Skip to main content

Reset your password

Please enter the e-mail address you used to register to reset your password

Note: The verification e-mail to change your password should arrive immediately. However, in some cases it takes longer. Don't forget to check your spam folder.

If you haven't received the e-mail in 24 hours, please contact customerservices@ioppublishing.org

Registration complete

Thank you for registering with Physics World
If you'd like to change your details at any time, please visit My account

Close
Home » Page 1974

India invests in fast-breeder reactor

The money will go on technology development and testing, materials science research, studies on the reprocessing of fast-breeder fuel, site investigations and preliminary building work. Construction – at an estimated cost of 30 billion rupees – is scheduled to begin in the year 2001 and continue for nine years.

The government, which has funded all of the atomic energy research in the country, is now urging the Nuclear Power Corporation to raise its own funds to build and operate nuclear power plants. Although the corporation has consistently made profits by selling electricity, it has encountered problems in raising money from the market. There are proposals to invite private sector participation and even foreign investments in the nuclear power sector. But foreign investment is unlikely at present because India is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Particle factory opens in Italy

Called DAFNE, the accelerator will be used for a range of experiments in nuclear and particle physics. The facility at the Frascati National Laboratories cost about L100 bn (about £36 m) to build and some 150 physicists from all over the world will conduct experiments there.

DAFNE consists of an injection system and a collider, where electrons and positrons circulate in two separate rings at 0.51 GeV, before colliding in the two experimental areas to produce copious quantities of phi-mesons. These short-lived particles contain a strange quark bound to strange antiquark and decay rapidly into other lighter particles, notably kaons.

“DAFNE is the first of its kind worldwide, the first so-called factory, producing an abundant number of particles, ” says Paolo Laurelli, director of the Frascati laboratory. Higher energy machines producing B-mesons – so-called B-factories – are planned for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California and at the KEK laboratory in Japan.

DAFNE will have three main experiments: KLOE, FINUDA and DEAR. The KLOE experiment will investigate the subtle differences between matter and antimatter found in the decay of neutral kaons – mesons that consist of a down quark and a strange antiquark or vice versa. When neutral kaons decay, they violate the CP theorem, which states that the physics of an interaction should not change if particles are replaced by their antiparticles and the interaction is reflected in a mirror. Studies of CP violation could help explain why the universe is dominated by matter rather than antimatter.

The FINUDA magnetic spectrometer will study what happens when an ordinary nucleon composed of up and down quarks – such as a proton or neutron – is replaced by a baryon containing a strange quark.

The object of DEAR is to produce “unnatural” atoms by replacing one electron in an ordinary atom with a kaon. Spectroscopic study of such atoms could lead to a better understanding of strong interactions and provide more accurate tests of quantum chromodynamics at low energies.

Experiments on DEAR are due to begin next summer, with both KLOE and FINUDA taking data by the end of 1998. At a later date, the facility could also be used to provide intense synchrotron radiation in the ultraviolet and soft X-ray range.

Australian physicists fight cuts in university budgets

After several decades of steady growth and achievement, Australian physicists are struggling. Deep funding cuts imposed by the coalition government have hurt the subject, especially in universities, and physicists can see only a dim light at the end of the tunnel. Although physics has not been singled out from other disciplines for cuts, its plight has become a public exemplar of what is happening throughout Australian university life.

The government claims the cuts are needed to improve the nation’s economic performance, but physicists fear that their subject will be downgraded from its status as a core scientific discipline. Some departments are already threatened with closure, while others are being slimmed down or merged with engineering. Researchers are also being asked to do increasing amounts of teaching.

Despite these problems, Australian physicists continue to be productive in research, particularly in astronomy and atomic and molecular physics. The strongest groups are surviving and some physicists recognize that rationalizations were necessary – indeed inevitable – after a period of rapid university growth. But as they lobby the government to rectify the situation, physicists are finding it hard to make much headway.

Funding squeeze

Since the conservative coalition government came to power last year, Australia’s higher education sector has been in regular conflict with the combative education minister, Amanda Vanstone. She has refused to finance long-delayed salary increases, and cut university budgets by about 15% over the four years to 2001. The knock-on effect is that the Australian Research Council (ARC), which supports individual peer-reviewed projects in universities, faces an 11% cut over three years to its annual budget, worth A$429 m (about £192 m) this year. Researchers are also dismayed that only 21% of grant applications to the ARC currently win funding.

Max Brennan – the plasma physicist who was head of the ARC for five years until August – claims that physics’ share of the ARC budget has increased slightly since last year, when it was worth A$23.5 m. However, Brennan would not comment further about the state of Australian physics, other than to say that “optics is the only field that has been targeted for priority in ARC funding”.

According to figures from the Bureau of Statistics, the total public expenditure on physics in Australia was A$182 m in 1994-95. The money supported 711 researchers, 881 technicians and postgraduates, and 590 other staff.

Erich Weigold, chairman of the Australian Academy of Science‘s national committee for physics, paints a gloomy picture of the physics scene. “[There is] severe pressure throughout and, in some universities, collapse and upheaval, ” he says. But the biggest concern facing the country’s 36 universities, according to Weigold, is “how people are disappearing in an unplanned and uncoordinated way. This is leaving physics in a vulnerable position, he says. He also points out that Australia lags well behind other OECD countries in the relative spend on physics and engineering.

Staffing cuts of 20% in individual universities have been common, but some physics departments have suffered even worse. The University of Tasmania, which is renowned for radioastronomy, has shed 12 of its 17 staff over the past two years, while the University of Queensland has lost one-third of its physics lecturers. At Queensland and at La Trobe in Melbourne, the physics and engineering departments have been merged.

Some smaller universities in rural areas have dropped physics teaching altogether, while the physics departments at Flinders University near Adelaide and Wollongong University near Sydney are even threatened with closure. The Wollongong case has become a national cause célèbre. One political columnist backed physics with such effect that the university announced last month that the department would remain, although it too would be transferred from the science to the engineering faculty. Other universities, such as the University of Technology in Sydney, have coped with the rapid drop in resources by rationalizing their offerings with the University of Sydney and not spreading themselves too widely.

As head of physics at the University of New South Wales – one of the largest physics schools in the country – Jan Oitmaa is well aware of the current crisis. Over the past four years he has had to cope with losing 12 of his 45 academic staff and the same number of general staff. “People are discouraged. Young physicists are in despair at their lack of career prospects. It’s not a pretty picture, ” he declares. “Unless there is an increase or redistribution of government funding, it will be difficult for any physics department to remain at world quality”.

Oitmaa is also president of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) and has carried out a survey of heads of physics at the country’s universities. It makes depressing reading. According to preliminary results, the number of academic staff has fallen from 389 in 1994 to 327 this year – a drop of 16% – and the number of general staff has dropped by a similar amount, with more cuts expected next year. Although student enrolments in physics have risen by 2.7% to 3892 full-time equivalents over the past three years, the total student load actually includes a lot of students, such as engineers, who take physics as a side subject.

The survey also asked heads of department to list the factors that are having “a harmful effect on their performance and viability”. Their biggest complaint is the increased teaching load, which has made it harder to do research and supervise postgraduates. Many also decry “the poor image of physics in the community” and are worried by the “harmful effects of excessive competition, such as the loss of the academic ethos, and a poor government attitude to universities”.

Tony Klein, a physicist at the University of Melbourne, believes that science policy in the university sector is driven entirely by student numbers. His colleague, Geoff Opat, agrees. “This place is thriving and vibrant but fragile. We have acted as a shield to the outside world but we can no longer do that, ” says Opat. “A ‘user pays’ market should not bethe sole criterion for a physics department.” University administrators fear that the government could introduce a large hike in tuition fees for science courses, which could deter students from choosing physics. Tuition fees, which were introduced in 1989, were increased substantially by the government last year.

Others, however, are more sanguine. “Prospects for our postgraduates in academic teaching and research are nil, but they all appear to get jobs, many by dispersal into non-academic areas, ” says Keith Nugent, head of physics at the University of Melbourne, which has 80 research students.

And although Richard Collins, head of physics at Sydney, speaks of “severe effects on confidence from staffing losses and halving of funding over five years”, he points to the continuing high quality of his students. “Seldom do any of our first-degree or postgraduate students fail to get jobs within three months of graduation, ” he adds.

The latest job statistics for physicists – published by the AIP in the July/August issue of The Australian and New Zealand Physicist – reveal that in 1996 university teaching appointments fell into the red, and industry and commerce effectively stopped advertising for physicists. Although the AIP has met the science minister, Peter McGauran, several times, he appears to have no flexibility to redistribute funds. “He comes across as very interested and supportive, but he hasn’t produced any kind of initiative with any real effect, ” says Oitmaa.

As in other countries, women are greatly in the minority in Australian physics. Only 11% of the AIP’s 2461 members are women, and there are no female professors. Cathy Foley, who chairs the AIP’s women in physics group and is one of the few senior female researchers in the CSIRO, criticizes the institute for not taking the problem of female students seriously enough. Although half of all chemistry students are female, physics has lagged at around 27% of enrolments. Foley believes that if more women chose to do physics, it would boost student numbers in physics and so drive more government funding into the subject.

Stars in their eyes

Despite the funding problems, Australian physicists continue to publish widely in a range of international journals. In particular, the country plays a leading role in atomic and molecular physics. Stars of the show in the early days included Bob Crompton and Leonard Huxley at the ANU, whose electron-swarm experiments still set the standard for low energy electron-atom and electron-molecule collisions. The University of Western Australia in Perth extends this tradition today – as do Flinders, Griffith and Murdoch. There are also strong laser physics groups at Adelaide, Macquarie and the ANU, while non-linear optics is another big area.

Plasma physics, meanwhile, is well-represented at Flinders and supported by the Heliac National Fusion Plasma Research Facility at the ANU. Australians claim to be the world-leaders in helicon plasma etching, depositing and processing of materials and wafers. Last year the ANU also opened the country’s only accelerator dedicated to nuclear physics, which now operates regularly at 16 MeV.

However, the only truly big science in Australia is astronomy. There are about 250 researchers in the field and they use a range of facilities. The Siding Spring Mountain site in northern New South Wales, for example, contains the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope and three ANU telescopes that are searching for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Although no longer the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere, the Anglo-Australian telescope is still highly innovative. The two-degree field instrument, for example, can study up to 400 galaxies at once and is creating the first map of the structure of the whole southern sky.

New South Wales is also home to CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility, which runs seven 22 m radio dishes at two separate sties, and a 64 metre dish at Parkes, about 300 km west of Sydney. The Parkes dish was upgraded this year with a multibeam receiver and is surveying thousands of galaxies in the Southern skies. Australia is also a partner with the US in an observatory on the South Pole, which is selecting the best place in Antarctica to build a permanent telescope. The superbly clear skies of the Antarctic may come to rival the power of the Hubble Space Telescope – at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the University of Sydney has a synthesis radiotelescope near Canberra to look for pulsars. The university also runs optical interferometers at the Narrabri Observatory that contain unique instruments for measuring the diameters of stars.

Since the early 1990s, Australian astronomers have also been trying to join in international projects. They smelled success in 1994 when the European Southern Observatory invited Australia to become its first non-European member and share in its Very Large Telescope, a linked set of four 8 m telescopes being built in Chile. Unfortunately, successive Australian governments have refused to pay Australia’s part of the project.

However, a new opportunity for international collaboration arose earlier this year, when Chile appeared unable to pay its share of the six-nation Gemini project – twin 8 m telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Although the ARC promised to make a financial commitment to the project (Physics World September p5), Chile finally came up with the money and Australian hopes for international collaboration appeared to have been dashed once again. A new approach to Australian membership could, however, succeed.

Meanwhile, radio astronomers at the Australia Telescope National Facility are at the forefront of an international collaboration seeking to build a 1 km2 super-sensitive telescope. There are several possible designs and sites, including a location in Australia.

Industrial action

Research physicists and applied physicists can also be found throughout Australian industry. However, Dennis Cooper, head of CSIRO’s telecommunications and industrial physics division, is hard pushed to assess the state of physics in the commercial world. “The problem is finding it. There are no big deals out there and there has been no economic analysis of physics’ impact, ” he says. CSIRO’s chief executive, Malcolm McIntosh, has told Cooper “to go out and get some excitement into Australian science”.

But with 310 research staff – including about 200 physicists – CSIRO’s telecommunications and industrial physics division has the largest concentration of physicists in Australia. It has an annual budget of A$48 m, of which 26% is earned externally. The problem, according to Cooper, is that industry has no tradition of pulling ideas through. “Young people studying physics don’t know where they will get a job, no matter how interesting they find the subject, ” he says.

CSIRO has therefore been successfully pushing for industrial applications, most coming from fundamental research. Examples include an unbalanced magnetron sputtering system, which lead to the deposition of titanium nitride by focused ion beams to make highly smooth, hard coatings for machine and dental tools. The Australian Mint now produces coins using dies that have been coated in this way. Larger devices are also being built to give longer life to drill bits for the mining industry.

Another winner is an application of hardness measuring equipment, which was developed by CSIRO and is now being licensed. The equipment reveals information about phases of materials from ultra-micro indentations, and 25 units have been sold world-wide for A$100 000-200 000 each. Intel, the US semiconductor giant, has already bought one.

Meanwhile, in a new lab at the University of New South Wales, Bob Clark builds transistors based on quantum effects and quantum wires using home-made equipment that would otherwise have cost about A$20m. Clark is also an expert in generating huge magnetic fields, and has created a world-record field of 70 T in his lab. He has also generated fields as high as 800 T at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, by compressing magnetic fields with high explosives.

The division also inherited a 50-year tradition in radio research. The work was initially triggered by the demands of radar specialists returning from the Second World War, who wanted highly sensitive receivers to investigate signals from the cosmos. Basic research in this area has lead directly to commercial applications. The division’s new multi-beam antenna for radioastronomy research, which has been installed in the 64 m dish at Parkes, also allows a telecommunications dish to simultaneously access up to 20 geostationary satellites.

Commercial applications of physics are also being encouraged by several of Australia’s 65 Co-operative Research Centres. These are jointly run by universities, industry andthe CSIRO. For example, Bruce Cornell and colleagues from the CRC for Molecular Engineering and Technology in Sydney have demonstrated a new nano-scale blood-type biosensor that can detect large proteins, bacteria, viruses and antibodies (Nature 1997 387 580). Unfortunately, the CRC programme has been threatened by David Mortimer, a businessman who shocked the science community in July when he recommended – in a report on industrial policy – that government funding for the CRCs should be decimated.

Get packing

According to Eric Weigold at the ANU, two areas in which Australian physics is under-represented are condensed-matter and high-energy physics. Much research in these areas relies on expensive, collaborative facilities, and the physics community lead a long campaign to convince successive Australian governments that the country should become a member of such international labs.

Crystallographers and chemists eventually managed to get into “suitcase science” in 1991, when they persuaded universities and funding bodies to support the Australian National Beamline Facility at the Photon Factory in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. The beamline is the first permanent Australian research facility overseas, and is now run by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) as a service to all scientists. An ANSTO-led consortium was also awarded A$11m in 1995 to take a share in the advanced photon source at Argonne National Laboratory in the US. The first Australian experiments were carried out there by Melbourne biomolecular scientists last month.

However, Australian particle physicists were not able to persuade the government of the merits of collaboration in their subject, and the high-energy community was prevented from gaining access to high-energy accelerators overseas. Like the Bragg family before them, most Australians in the field left their homes for good.

George Dracoulis, who is head of nuclear physics at the ANU, claims that his fission and fusion group leads the world in rethinking how heavy nuclei fuse. But like other Australian physicists, resources are a nagging worry. “Our lab is running at the scale of a national lab in the US, like Argonne and Berkeley, yet we have one-third to one-quarter of their staff and resources.” Australia is not prepared to support home-grown facilities, but it is only too willing to fund “suitcase scientists” who travel overseas, declares Dracoulis – before dashing off to a conference in Copenhagen.

Home and away

Australia, it is said, rode into the 20th century on the sheep’s back, such was the prosperity of its graziers following the introduction of the Merino breed, which produced fine wool for the world’s textile mills. Later, as its ancient and varied geology was better understood, Australia also became known abroad for its exports of rich mineral deposits. Farmers and miners needed little encouragement to turn to science for solutions to the problems that they faced in the world’s driest continent.

In 1926 the government therefore set up a national research agency, which later became the powerful Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Physics was part of CSIRO from the start. It initially served the rural economy – particularly mineral exploration – before emerging in its own right as a separate discipline, most prominently through its pioneering role in radio physics after the Second World War.

Of course, physics had long been an important part of Australian universities. Like many of the early scientists, the first heroes of Australian physics came from Britain. William Henry Bragg, for example, brought lustre to the new University of Adelaide when he arrived in 1885. However, much of his work on the development of X-ray crystallography was done after he and his son, William Lawrence Bragg, returned to the UK in 1908, and Australians seldom recognize the Braggs’ local achievements.

Physicists were also central to the development of Australia’s research reactor near Sydney. The reactor produces radioisotopes for medicine, industry, environmental monitoring and basic research, and last month the government announced that a new A$300m reactor will be built to replace it by 2005.

But the physicist who is acknowledged to have played the key role in the emergence of Australian research is Mark Oliphant. Like most other young Australian scientists before the 1960s, he had to go to the UK for postgraduate research and – because of a lack of facilities back home – stayed there to pursue a research career. Oliphant worked with Rutherford on nuclear structure at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and then helped to develop the atomic bomb on the Manhattan Project. He was eventually attracted back home in 1950 to the well equipped physics research school at the Australian National University in Canberra.

The school, which has since merged with engineering, contains the country’s highest concentration of basic physics research and claims to produce a quarter of the nation’s physics output. On retirement, Oliphant was appointed governor of South Australia and – through his strong moral standing against nuclear weapons and for peace – became one of the most respected figures in public life. An icon of Australian science, Oliphant is now an alert 96-year-old.

Labour disappoints

The Labour government in the UK has certainly moved quickly since it was swept into power at the start of May. At first it was window-dressing – “call me Tony” the new prime minister Tony Blair told the first meeting of the new cabinet. But there has been substance too: Scotland and Wales have already voted in favour of devolution, the Bank of England has been given more independence and there have been genuine efforts to get the “peace train” moving in Northern Ireland. However, it was all quiet on the science front until Margaret Beckett, the cabinet minister with responsibility for science, delivered her first major speech on science and engineering last month. Beckett explained to the annual meeting of the British Association in Leeds that the government was still developing its policy for the science base: “We will not rush into initiatives just for the sake of early action.” But she made a point of not promising extra money for science.

So what is Labour’s science policy so far? Beckett identified three priorities: partnership between business, the scientific community and the government to maximize the benefits flowing from scientific and technological developments; the need to maximize the potential of people, “the scientific world’s most important resource”; and increased public understanding of science to ensure that social, environmental and economic objectives are met. All told, Labour’s embryonic science policy – in particular Beckett’s comment that “it is essential we make maximum entrepreneurial use of the outcomes of science” – is little different from that of the previous Conservative government.

But there are differences too. Beckett emphasized that the Labour government would pay as much attention to improving the quality of life as it would to creating wealth, which previously had top priority. Moreover she promised that Labour would be taking a long-term view of science “far beyond the perspective of one parliament or even one government”. Before then, however, is the pressing problem of the decaying research infrastructure in UK universities. The Dearing report on the future of universities estimated that it would cost at £500m to bring this infrastructure up to date.

Beckett was explicit about her support for universities. “The UK still has an excellent science base, which is a tribute to those who have carried out research and teaching in our universities over many years, ” she said in Leeds. “And this has been achieved despite widespread concerns about the problem of funding. Let me state emphatically that this government attaches great importance to supporting and strengthening that base.”

Much will depend on the government’s forthcoming response to Dearing, although its reactions so far do not fill one with hope. Dearing’s recommendations on tuition fees and student maintenance grants were effectively ignored by the education secretary David Blunkett, while the government has yet to confirm that the money raised from tuition fees – let alone any of the “new” money requested by Dearing – will go to universities. And a week after Beckett’s speech, John Battle – one of her deputies and the minister for science, energy and industry – mocked Dearing’s proposal for an Industrial Partnership Development Fund funded by the public and private sectors.

Beckett and Battle are clearly interested in science. Battle in particular is a passionate and enthusiastic politician with a healthy appetite for meeting people and visiting laboratories. That enthusiasm needs to be turned into action. Before the election, Labour politicians were quick to point out how the UK’s position in various league tables – e.g. the world prosperity league, R&D spend as a percentage of GDP – had slipped under the Conservatives, but their performance so far suggests a “business-as-normal” approach to science and technology. Unless new policies are developed fast, Labour is unlikely to benefit the science base in the UK in the short, medium or long terms.

Glimmer of peace in the science wars

Most scientists think that they know how science works. You take a theory, make a prediction and then do an experiment to test your hypothesis. At least that is the image that most scientists tend to project to the public. But science is rarely so clear-cut. Scientists are also affected by social factors; their choice of research depends on which topics are flavour of the month, which theories are in fashion and even whether a referee happened to like their last paper.

So how do scientists agree about what counts as truth? How do people decide what is to be called “knowledge”? And what is a valid scientific method? These are some of the questions that a relatively obscure band of sociologists and philosophers have been mulling over for the past 25 years. Known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the subject is part of a broader discipline called science and technology studies. Its practitioners try to answer these questions by examining case histories from science, without taking a stance on whether the science itself is correct. Those doing SSK have, for example, examined how physicists earlier this century measured the speed of light to test Einstein’s special theory of relativity. They analyse historical events as if they were there at the time, taking on board all the doubts and uncertainties of the age.

All this may sound harmless enough. But when some scientists – mainly physicists – started to notice what the sociologists were saying, they were appalled to find that the conventional view of science as a search for ultimate truths about the universe appeared to be under threat. Prominent physicists began to attack sociologists, angry at the apparent subversion of scientists’ cherished beliefs. However, the “science wars” remained quite restrained until last year, when Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University, published a deliberately meaningless paper in a journal called Social Text. Sokal’s article parodied what he saw as the absurd statements, false erudition and sloppy thinking of some modern sociologists and philosophers. When he revealed his hoax in another article a few weeks later, all hell broke loose.

Sociologists complained that Sokal had misinterpreted their comments and taken them out of context. In an attempt to call a truce in the science wars, Harry Collins, a sociology professor from Southampton University in the UK, hosted a “science peace” workshop at the end of July. Scientists at the meeting soon made it clear that they were happy to admit that science is a human endeavour, that merits rigorous social analysis. “There’s no question that social phenomena of all sorts play a role in the creation of science, ” said Kurt Gottfried, a theoretical high-energy physicist from Cornell University in the US. But what upsets scientists – as one delegate pointed out – is when sociologists argue that science is just another social practice that produces myths which are no more valid than anyone else’s.

Trevor Pinch, who has taught science studies at Cornell for the past seven years, tried to explain why sociologists do not like the idea of the mythical scientist. He said they prefer to see science as a type of expertise. “Scientific experts are skilful practitioners, like potters, carpenters or plumbers, ” explained Pinch, who has a PhD in physics. “We’re not saying that science is like plumbing or carpentry, rather that the right model for thinking about the nature of science in relation to its public is [as] a body of expertise, carried out by expert-leading practitioners. Science should be accorded all the attention and respect we give other groups in society.” His view was supported by Collins, who pledged: “I desperately want to undermine the image of science as a complete and exhaustive account of the world.”

Although many scientists would probably agree that cannot explain everything, they do believe that it can provide ultimate truths about the universe, and they would be bemused to hear that it is no more than a body of expertise. They also argue that to work out how society influences science, you actually have to study the content of the scientific theories themselves. Gottfried tried to get to the nub of the argument. If knowledge is a social construct – in other words, if society, rather than nature, is the cause of scientific beliefs – why can scientific theories make predictions about nature that are often so spectacularly successful? David Bloor, a sociologist from Edinburgh University, took up the challenge. “[Scientists] are responding to nature through and by virtue of society, ” he revealed. “If I’m right, it’s a failure to grasp that that’s actually causing a lot of trouble in the science wars.”

When David Mermin, a solid-state physicist from Cornell and a key protagonist in the science wars, got to his feet, peace appeared to break out – momentarily, at least. “I find myself in agreement with everything David Bloor says, ” he announced. But the delicate consensus quickly fell apart, as Mermin went on to explain his unease. He said that sociologists tend to mischaracterize how science is done, because they fail to appreciate how cautious and conservative scientists are when they test their theories. Jay Labinger, a chemist from the California Institute of Technology, also pointed out those who do SSK tend to limit themselves to a few selected case-histories, before making sweeping generalizations about the whole of science. His other complaint was that they cannot agree on their own methodology, while at the same time criticizing how science operates.

But do the science wars actually matter? Sociologists like Collins and Pinch worry that the public sees only the mythical view of science, and then does not understand things when the human side of science leaks out. Others like Sokal, who was not at the meeting, feel that the attitude of some sociologists and philosophers signifies a growing hollowness of intellectual thought. And as Steve Miller, a planetary physicist and science communicator from University College London pointed out at the meeting, many scientists worry that SSK is undermining the rational, logical world-picture of science. “They fear that if this process is not stopped, it could open the backdoor to superstitious, magical interpretations of the world, ” argued Miller.

And as a sign of how seriously some take the science wars, Pinch told the meeting that he recently received his first piece of anonymous hate-mail.

Laser highlights

The many achievements and uses of the electron have been widely celebrated this year. Photonics has not yet had the impact of electronics, although the interdisciplinary subject of optoelectronics underpins the whole communications industry.

For a particle with no mass and no charge, however, the photon has certainly made its presence felt, as highlighted by many articles in this issue. Semiconductor lasers have carved out huge niches in the communications and consumer-electronics industries, but physicists are always looking for ways to improve the performance of these devices. Laser-based fluorescence techniques play a key role in the international efforts to unravel the secrets of the human genome, while optical tweezers are routinely used to manipulate a variety of specimens in biological laboratories. Laser ultrasound is now an established technique for non-destructive testing in the aircraft industry and the establishment of standards for visual performance in twilight conditions has also been the subject of recent research.

Although it is still not possible to control single photons, meaningful experiments with pairs of correlated photons are now commonplace (albeit by using only about one pair in a million) and this work could lead to a new era of quantum information technology. Like computers, lasers are getting ever smaller and ever faster, although there is still the odd behemoth the size of a football pitch, and the ultimate dream of the optical computer seems a long way off.

In plasma physics, X-ray lasers are edging towards the so-called water window between 23 and 44 Angstroms. Absorption by water is minimal in this biologically interesting wavelength region. Laser and accelerator-based radiation sources are also converging: sub-picosecond X-ray pulses have been generated in prototype experiments by scattering ultrashort laser pulses from 20 MeV electrons. And the next (fourth) generation of synchrotron radiation sources will almost certainly be free-electron laser sources. In these machines bunches of electrons from a linear accelerator emit light when they are forced to “wiggle” through arrays of magnets.

And now the E144 collaboration based at Stanford in the US has achieved “pair production” in light-by-light scattering for the first time. In other words, they have produced photons so energetic that they can annihilate into electron-positron pairs when they scatter. The E144 team shone a high-intensity laser at a beam of 46.6 GeV electrons. The laser wavelength corresponded to a photon energy of 2.35 eV, and Compton scattering from the electrons boosted this to 29.2 GeV. The pair production occurs in a multiphoton scattering process that involves four laser photons and one Compton-scattered photon. This is distinct from the fairly common process whereby two particles annihilate to produce a virtual (or short-lived massive) photon that then decays back into a particle-antiparticle pair.

Another fertile area of research at the interface between lasers and particle physics is the use of plasma waves to accelerate particles. Experimenters have confirmed that fields of 100 GVm -1 can be generated in a laser-produced plasma – and have accelerated electrons in these fields. However, plasmas are riddled with instabilities and other disruptive events, and accelerator builders have not yet abandoned more reliable tools such as magnets and cavities.

Seventy years ago the 5th Solvay conference in Brussels was devoted to the theme “electrons and photons”. The great debate between Einstein and Bohr about the interpretation of quantum theory started in Solvay. If he were alive today, Einstein might be upset to learn that his doubts about quantum mechanics have been largely overlooked, but he would surely be pleased to know that people are still using electrons and photons to prove that E=mc 2.

Canadian physicists work hard to defend their subject

Three years ago, physicists in Canada suffered a collective shock. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) cut funds for the subject by 8%. The cut was the result of a pioneering effort by the council – the chief source of public funds for research in Canada – to reallocate research grants among the 20+ disciplines it supports.

“We basically suffered the maximum swing, ” laments Henry van Driel, a physicist at the University of Toronto. And the situation could get worse. NSERC is in the middle of a three-year period during which its overall budget is being cut by 20%, and it is also in the midst of another exercise that will reallocate another 10% of its budget. According to van Driel, the average physicist receiving federal support has suffered a 20-25% cut in funding in recent years.

Canada’s physics community clearly faces a difficult situation. The first reallocation exercise “provided a massive jolt to the system”, says Gordon Drake of the University of Windsor. “You are forced to make decisions on whether people with small grants should be cut off altogether to support high-quality work.” While no major physics or physicists have yet been lost as a result of the cuts, the community fears that the latest reallocation – which is due next year – could cause serious harm. Physicists are therefore working hard to justify physics research – and Canadian contributions to it – to the external referees who will determine NSERC’s new funding profile.

“We’ve been mounting lobbying efforts, ” says Drake. “The physics community as a whole is becoming more aware of the need to put forward the case why physics should be supported. If we get another cut, a lot of people will go out of business.”

No going back

Many Canadian physicists regard NSERC’s 1994 decision – which shifted money from physics to subjects such as biotechnology and engineering – as a major error of judgement. “There was a sense that the [reallocation] committee really didn’t understand the field, ” recalls Pekka Sinervo of the University of Toronto. Others feel that the physics community did not take the initial reallocation seriously enough – in terms of justifying their R&D efforts – until it was too late. Sinervo and others are now working to remedy that. Sinervo is in charge of writing a review of sub-atomic physics (as particle and nuclear physics is called in Canada) for the latest reallocation committee. Drake and van Driel are in charge of the general physics report, while Michael Thewalt of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver will cover condensed-matter physics. Significantly, written reviews of this type played no role in the 1994 reallocation.

NSERC will make its decisions on reallocating funds by next April. Much of the community anticipates those decisions eagerly. “I’m cautiously optimistic, ” says Sinervo. “We understand better the scientific process by which the fields are being judged. People are hoping that this new reallocation will produce an outcome that’s fair across the spectrum of science.”

Physicists are also facing the possibility that, fair or not, the reallocation could make the situation worse. “The mood of Canadian physicists is mildly despondent but somewhat optimistic, ” says Francine Ford, executive director of the 1600-member Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP). Despondency follows naturally from the funding situation, which is difficult even without reallocation. “Because of down-sizing, ” says Ford, “a lot of our membership is considering early retirement.” On the other hand, a “highly-qualified personnel” survey carried out this year for CAP by Michael Steinitz of St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia tells a much more comforting tale. The survey focused on individuals who received bachelors’ degrees in physics from Canadian universities between 1985 and 1996. Fewer than 2% of roughly 950 respondents reported that they were unemployed. That number surprised Steinitz, who says that he tells his students “not to expect employment”. The survey should also provide answers to critics in government who, says Steinitz, believe that “physicists are unemployable, and the country should put money into areas where we can get employable graduates.” Not surprisingly, about half the respondents had jobs in R&D or teaching, and 52% reported that they use their physics background directly in their work. Even some of the anomalies show up well for physics training. “We found the highest salaries among graduates of sub-atomic physics courses who are now working in the stock market, doing time-series analysis, Fourier analysis and so on, ” reports Steinitz.

“It’s clear that a physics degree does not lead only into an academic or research lab career, ” comments Ford. “If that message can get out, the future of the discipline is fairly comfortable.”

Fundamental strengths

Canadian physics is healthy in more than its ability to produce graduates who can walk into high-paying jobs. The field has its share of world-class researchers and laboratories, in fields as diverse as cosmology, condensed-matter physics, atomic energy and optics. Indeed, the crown jewels of Canadian physics cover a wide spectrum.

Canada’s strength in optics and lasers is the legacy of Gerhard Herzberg, the Nobel laureate spectroscopist who worked at the University of Saskatchewan and then the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. “Canada has a very strong reputation in areas related to spectroscopy, ” says Drake. “That has naturally fed into laser physics.”

One of the brightest stars in this firmament is the team headed by Paul Corkum at the NRC Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Montreal. (Not to be confused with NSERC, which is a grant funding agency, the NRC runs 16 research institutes in 11 cities across Canada.) Corkum’s team specializes in high-intensity laser physics and works with femtosecond pulses of light that have very high intensity, even though they possess virtually no energy. The joy of the work, says Corkum, “is that femtosecond science has broad implications everywhere.” Two themes in his work are the creation of ultrashort pulses, lasting only 100 attoseconds, and the use of laser pulses to monitor chemical reactions. “Within a year, ” says Corkum, “we’ll be able to image chemistry as it occurs.”

Optics research at Laval University in Quebec has also led to several successful spin-off companies (see box).

At Windsor University, Drake leads a group of international renown that specializes in the theory of helium’s atomic structure. “Helium is much more convenient than hydrogen because it is monatomic, ” explains Drake. “We can do things so accurately that we’re at the border between atomic and nuclear physics.” Table-top laser experiments can now explore regions of physics that once required nuclear accelerators, says Drake. Another highlight is Sageev John’s group at the University of Toronto. John’s work focuses on photon localization and the application of photon band-gap materials (in which photons behave analogously to the way electrons behave in semiconductors). His group is also studying – theoretically at present – new phases of light between the coherent and incoherent states. “The main thrust and attraction here is the combination of quantum optics and condensed matter physics, ” he says. “This has important implications for switching and optical transistors.”

Within condensed matter physics there are also strong groups working on high-temperature superconductivity at the University of British Columbia and McMaster University, while semiconductor physics takes the spotlight at Toronto, British Columbia and St Francis Xavier Universities.

Canada’s best-known astronomy centre is probably the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), which was founded in 1984 to provide theoretical support for a country with a long history of outstanding observations. Based at the University of Toronto, CITA has a large and successful post-doctoral school, funded by NSERC. “We always have the same short-list of post-docs as Caltech and Princeton, ” boasts deputy director Peter Martin. “And our faculty members are so good that they’re under attack by recruiters from foreign institutions.” Indeed CITA has lost two senior members to the US in the past six months, including former director Scott Tremaine, who was recruited to head Princeton University’s astrophysical centre.

“Our mandate is to do a bit of everything and evolve with the times, ” adds Martin. Part of CITA’s role is to promote theory at other universities, so its researchers have a broad range of interests, with particular strength in cosmology – notably microwave background, galaxy formation and the early universe.

Working with industry

The National Research Council (NRC) runs a number of institutes that have strong physics programmes and good links with industry too. The Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, for instance, provides precision measurements for international standards bodies and commercial customers. One particular speciality is standards relevant to the telecommunications industry, which associate research officer Alan Madej describes as “a big theme in Canada”.

Another NRC lab in Ottawa, the Institute for Microstructural Sciences, also works on issues relevant to telecommunications. Research at the Institute includes fibre optics, solid-state optoelectronics, nanoelectronics and single-electron transistors. Again, practical applications are becoming as important as fundamental research. “If you understand the problems of industry in a two-to-five-year time frame, you can understand better the requirements for a ten-year time frame, ” explains Thomas Jackman, director for materials technologies. About two hours drive west of Ottawa are the Chalk River Laboratories of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL), another organization that is becoming increasingly commercial. Bertram Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for his pioneering neutron scattering experiments at Chalk River in the 1950s. Now the lab’s key product is the CANDU of series nuclear reactors. Originally developed in the 1940s, the reactors can burn a variety of fuels, including spent fuel from light water reactors.

About 100 physicists work in Chalk River’s fuel and fuel cycle department. “Fuel cycle technology is a big area of R&D in Canada and AECL, ” explains department director Peter Boczar. The technology has brought commercial rewards and CANDU reactors are either operating or under construction in five countries outside Canada. Another venture, to develop reactors that make medical isotopes, has recently received the official go-ahead.

But Chalk River has had its share of bad news recently. Last year the government closed down the Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) at the lab. TASCC employed about 70 physicists, although half have found other positions in AECL. Some of the rest are expected to move to the TRIUMF facility in Vancouver, although TASCC’s director, John Hardy, has left Canada for the University of Texas at Austin.

TRIUMF has a star turn of its own – the isotope separation facility known as ISAC. Scheduled to start up in 1999, ISAC will produce low-energy radioactive beams for nuclear physics and astrophysics experiments. “It is being built by the Canadian government, ” says Sinervo, “and the primary users will be Canadian.”

That emphasis is unusual in a way. Canadian physicists, including Sinervo, often express their pride in their country’s strong record of collaboration in international ventures. “One of the features of Canadian physics is the variety of international collaborations we maintain, on an individual as well as an institutional basis, ” says Drake, whose group collaborates with teams in the US, UK, Italy and Germany. Sinervo points to two larger collaborations in sub-atomic physics. In a nickel mine 2070m below ground in Sudbury, Ontario, physicists from Canada, the UK and the US are building a massive neutrino detector. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory will be able to distinguish different types of neutrino from the Sun because it uses heavy water to detect these elusive particles. Canada has provided about C$300m worth of heavy water, and is responsible for about two-thirds of the total project. Elsewhere, Canada has a 3% stake in the Atlas detector planned for the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva.

People, as well as projects, have an international flavour in Canadian physics. “The University of Toronto attracts very good post-docs from Europe, ” says Sageev John. “Canada as a whole is very attractive to foreign physicists and it’s not as difficult to emigrate to as the US.” John’s own group includes physicists from China, Ethiopia, India, Russia, the Ukraine and Vietnam. And from a different floor of the University of Toronto’s MacLellan physics building, CITA dispatches trained astrophysicists all over the globe.

Might effective placement become a brain drain in an era of concern about funds for research? “There are no hard numbers, just a general concern raised by our members, ” says Francine Ford. This concern focuses on the US where, she says, physicists can expect “more money, more support, better facilities, and more stability.” And unlike their counterparts in the US, Canadian physicists receive no government funds for defence-related research.

Ford notes some recent high-profile moves to the US, including Tremaine from CITA and Hardy from TASCC. “If you lose enough of those people, you lose your standing on an international level.”

Preventing future shocks

So what is the Canadian physics community doing about the situation? The Canadian Association of Physicists and leading physicists have recently joined with leaders of other scientific fields in an effort to put their views across to parliament. According to Ford, “the physics community has been much more active, presenting a common front to the government.” Gordon Drake agrees: “The physics community as a whole is becoming more aware of the need for putting forward the case why physics should be supported.” The scientist/lobbyists are working against long odds. “Science is not at the cabinet table per se, ” says Ford, explaining that the Secretary of State for Science and Technology reports to the Minister of Industry. And basic research seems to be the major target for funding cutbacks. “We’re trying to give them the old message that you don’t cut the tree to harvest the fruit, ” she adds. “One of the difficult messages to get across is that fundamental research should be funded by the government.”

Some parts of government have received the message. Ontario’s provincial government has set up a series of scientific centres of excellence over the past nine years. One success story is the Ontario Laser and Light Wave Research Centre, on the University of Toronto campus. Staff at the centre aim to communicate academic findings to industry, carry out their own research, and provide an instrumentation or resource facility where industry can do short-term testing and development. And prominent companies are trying to form links to academic physics departments across Canada. Northern Telecom, for example, has set up the Nortel Institute of Communications, which endows chairs and funds students. Much of what is happening in Canada – an increase in funds for university-industry collaborations at the expense of support for pure research – mirrors what is happening in the US and throughout Europe. But Canadian physicists have learned the lessons of 1994 and they are ready to temporarily swap the lab for the lobby in the defence of their subject.

Companies see the light

Canada is a significant player in the world of commercial optics thanks to spin-off companies from universities. The spin-offs cover a range of technologies and institutions. For example, Bomem Inc, which makes Fourier transform interferometers, was started by Henry Buijs from Laval University. Bill Morrow, a graduate student at York University in Toronto, started up The Resonance Company in an campus “incubator”. The company produces resonance lamps that now fly on several space missions. And Lorne Whitehead, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, founded TIR Systems to market the Light Pipe, a total-internal reflection device that he developed to light his laboratory.

Canada’s outstanding success in optics-related spin-offs, however, is Lumonics. Based in Kanata, near Ottawa, the company has become a major supplier of lasers worldwide. Lumonics had its origins in 1970. Soon after Jacques Beaulieu and colleagues at Canada’s Defence Research Laboratories developed the TEA laser, the government offered the technology for licensing. Alan Crawford, an engineer with an entrepreneurial bent but no experience in laser physics, and two fellow engineers snapped up one of the two licences awarded.

“These fellows didn’t know one end of a laser from another, ” recalls Boris Stoicheff, a laser physicist then at the University of Toronto. They did know enough, however, to recruit Stoicheff as part-time science adviser to Lumonics. During his seven years in that post, Stoicheff’s academic group was developing an excimer laser. The group licensed the technology to Lumonics, for which excimer lasers became a second product line.

Since then, Lumonics has become a multinational company with annual sales of more than C$200m and an R&D spend of C$16.2m (some 7.7% of sales). It has six applications laboratories around the world, with a seventh, in Singapore, due to open this year. The company’s laser systems serve four main industrial markets: semiconductor and electronics; automotive; aerospace; and packaging.

Last year, the company developed new laser marking technologies for the semiconductor industry and this year it plans to launch new, high-powered solid-state lasers for the car and aerospace markets. And Lumonics has not forgotten its academic roots: it now sponsors an industrial research chair in laser physics at the University of Toronto.

Off the beaten track

Point your Web browser at http://www.agacooker.com/disc.html and you will learn how Gustav Dalen, the Swedish inventor who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1912, invented the Aga cooker to release his wife from some of the drudgery of cooking. Dalen only realized that his wife was “virtually enslaved” in the kitchen after he was blinded by an explosion in his laboratory and had to spend much of his time at home. Ironically, Dalen had received the prize for his work on lighting beacons and light buoys: this involved developing techniques to store large volumes of acetylene (dissolved in acetone) in a porous mass, the “aga”, at high pressures. Not all discoveries involve such misfortune – nor lead to such desirable status symbols as Aga cookers – and few are so easily identified with one person or academic discipline. The World Wide Web is a case in point. It was developed by a British physicist in 1990. Actually, it was developed by a British physicist working as a computer programmer at CERN, a particle physics laboratory funded by 19 or so nations in Europe, in collaboration with a Belgian computer scientist at CERN. And it only really took off following the development of Web browsers by two researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993. But few discoveries are even as clear-cut as the Web. Indeed it is now widely accepted that the path from a discovery in basic research to a profitable product is long and complex. The feature articles in this issue looks at some of the physics involved at different points along this path. The articles are not concerned with discoveries such as the transistor or the laser (or the Web or Aga cooker), but with on-going product and process improvements in the oil, glass and car industries.

Peter King of BP Exploration summarizes the array of techniques used to improve the productivity of oil and gas fields. These include the application of abstract techniques from statistical physics to, for example, maximize profitability or predict the flow of fluids in reservoirs. John Bradshaw of Pilkington looks at car windscreens. Car companies have to take a variety of factors into consideration when designing a window – its strength and resistance to impact, its optical properties and its visual appearance being three of the most important – and must also make sure that the windscreen can be manufactured as efficiently as possible. Challenges for the future include integrating all manner of antennae and electronics into the screen. Windscreens figure large in the work of Gary Strumolo and Viswanathan Babu of Ford. They explain the advantages of the “virtual wind tunnel” that simulates the flow of air over a car: a physical model of the vehicle is no longer needed and the simulations provide more information than even the best-instrumented experiments. As Strumolo and Babu say: “once you know the flow around a car, you can predict everything from its fuel efficiency and handling characteristics to the noise that the passengers can hear inside.” The problem is that you need to know about face-centred hypercubes in four-dimensional spaces.

Charles Duke of Xerox Corporation looks at the bigger picture for physicists working in industry. It is important to realize, he writes, that no single model can be applied to R&D, and that the “big bang” and “big brother” models in particular – the models that most physicists know best – are no longer valid. At Xerox “commercial value rather than technical novelty or elegance is rewarded”.

Even computer games companies have been turning to physics – as in the laws of motion rather than warp-drive adventures in hyperspace – to make their games more realistic. Indeed, in the real and virtual worlds there are still plenty of opportunities for physicists who are willing to get their hands dirty and tackle problems in what are not usually considered to be physics-based industries.

New horizons for R&D

The globalization of industrial research and development is now a fact of life. R&D was once a corporate function, performed on a single site near a company’s headquarters. But now the increasingly global nature of the markets for high-tech products, combined with ever shorter product cycles, requires goods to be manufactured all over the world and, as a result, the R&D needed to support this activity must be close at hand. Cheaper labour and reduced transport costs provide even further incentives.

But that hardly explains why Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, has chosen Cambridge in the UK as the site of its first basic research facility outside the US. Microsoft has recognized that knowledge itself is an increasingly global commodity and one that it must actively seek out. The Microsoft deal is actually quite a small example of the UK’s success in attracting high-tech inward investment. Indeed the UK attracts more inward investment than any country in Europe. And not all of this goes to well-off areas like the Silicon Fen around Cambridge: south Wales, Silicon Glen in Scotland, the north-east of England and Northern Ireland have all received big investments by various computer, electronics, semiconductor and magnetic disk drive companies from the US and the far East. These sites cover a broad range of functions from basic research to full-scale manufacturing plants.

So what are the characteristics of a successful foreign R&D site? Walter Kuemmerle of the Harvard Business School recently studied 32 US, Japanese and European multinational companies, mostly in the electronics and pharmaceutical sector (Harvard Business Review March-April 1997). The companies had a total of 156 dedicated R&D sites abroad, more than 60% of them established after 1984. Kuemmerle found that the centres typically employed about 100 people and could be divided almost equally between two types of site. The first, home-base-augmenting sites, tap knowledge from competitors and universities around the globe and send it back to headquarters. Such labs are often found in the original Silicon Valley in California, Princeton in New Jersey and the Kanto area around Japan. For such labs to be successful the director must be a prominent local scientist who can attract talent and build collaborations with local centres of excellence. Microsoft Research Cambridge is of this ilk. Close ties with the home-base site – best achieved through exchange visits – are also vital. The second, home-base-exploiting sites, support manufacturing and product development overseas. Their primary role is to speed the transfer of technology from the home-base site to the manufacturing plant. Therefore they need to be close to large markets and are best managed by a company employee. Although the two types of sites have very different roles, Kuemmerle identified several characteristics that are essential for both. In particular, the directors of such labs need four qualities: they must be respected scientists and good managers; they have to be able to integrate the new site into the company’s existing R&D network; they need to have comprehensive knowledge of technology trends; and they have to be able to build good local links. “Appointing an outstanding scientist or engineer who has no management experience can be disastrous”, he warns. Back in the UK it could be argued, of course, that the high level of inward investment in the UK is a sign of the weakness of British companies in high-tech areas. However, complaints that the profits generated by discoveries made at Microsoft Research Cambridge will flow overseas ring hollow because the company has not received any government subsidies to set up in Cambridge. And it is near-impossible to have sympathy with the most frequent complaint about the investment – that it will increase house prices and traffic jams in the city. Haven’t they heard of the information superhighway?

Skirmishes on the wild side of science

Steve Donnelly, professor of experimental physics at Salford University, is about to read my mind. “Think of a two-digit number between 1 and 50, ” he says, “with both digits odd.” I think of 33. “But the digits must be different, so 33, for example, wouldn’t be allowed.” I think of 37. “Don’t choose it yet, let me concentrate. Now think of it.” I think of 39. “For a moment I had an impression of 37, but now I’m sure it’s 39.”

It’s a simple trick, exploiting the woeful predictability of the human mind, but nonetheless impressive to the victim. For mind-reading is just one skill Donnelly has picked up in a parallel career of scrutinising astrology, UFOs, dowsing, psychic powers, ghosts and other weird ideas which are not normally the province of respectable physicists. Donnelley’s curiosity about so-called “paranormal” phenomena was sparked in 1973 when, as an MSc student at Sussex University, he saw a TV programme in which psychic Uri Geller bent cutlery to the pop-eyed amazement of mathematical physicist John Taylor. Donnelly’s attempts to investigate Geller-type phenomena in his laboratory came to nothing – “I think it was probably more hopeful expectation than good sense” – and he became increasingly sceptical of psychic claims of all kinds. “The turning point was when I realised that many conjurers could replicate feats performed by psychics, ” he recalls. “Why should psychic powers manifest themselves as conjuring tricks? Surely there are ways in which one could demonstrate psychic powers that are not replicable by a conjurer.”

After gaining a PhD in ion beam interactions with solids at Salford University, Donnelly worked in Belgium, the US and Australia, before returning to Salford in 1986. Alarmed to find that public fascination with the paranormal had ballooned while he was away, he joined UK Skeptics, a loose association devoted to the scrutiny of paranormal claims. Since 1989 he has been co-editor of its journal, The Skeptic (the US spelling seems obligatory in this field) and is now one of the few British scientists ready to appear on TV and radio to talk about such things. As he says, “Someone needs to be available to put the rationalist point of view.” For example, a TV company recently asked him to examine a home-video sequence that appeared to show balls of light making crop circles in a corn field. Hollywood special effects experts had declared that it could not have been easily faked. “They said it couldn’t be done without a million dollars of resources, ” Donnelly says, “but I showed it could have been done with a sheet of glass and a small computer.” Yet most of the bizarre claims increasingly featured in popular TV programmes go uncontested, to the point where simple party tricks are held up as challenges to science. To those who regard such stuff as harmless nonsense, Donnelly has a chilling rejoinder. Just before Easter he was asked by a TV producer to comment on an apparently whimsical story about an alien spaceship hiding behind Comet Hale-Bopp. “It was based on a photograph by an amateur astronomer showing a star near the head of the comet. Lens aberrations had distorted the image into a classic UFO shape.” A few days later 39 members of a US cult killed themselves in the belief that the “spaceship” was coming to take them away from their material bodies. Against that appalling perspective, Donnelly’s fears for rationality do not seem excessive.

Yet he is concerned not to be seen merely as a debunker. “I am very much an experimental scientist, ” he explains. “For me it is the quality of the experimental evidence that counts. If there was significant evidence from well-controlled experiments that demonstrated, for instance, that the position of the planets could influence human personality, I would be persuaded by the evidence that there was something worth investigating even if there was no known theoretical means whereby that could happen. I know of no area of purportedly paranormal phenomena where that is the case.” Are some scientists hostile to paranormal claims because, paradoxically, they fear that among the dross there might be a germ of truth? After all, if any one of these claims were verified, it would have shattering implications for physics. “To be on the cusp of a paradigm shift is a way of getting your graffiti on to the walls of the universe, ” Donnelly counters sagely. “That is the place to be for a physicist. A lot of highly respectable scientists jumped into cold fusion even though that would have involved significant rewriting of what we know about nuclear physics. They carried out experiments, looked at the evidence and moved back out again. If there was a reasonable expectation that there was a new force or field giving rise to telepathy, for instance, physicists would want to get involved in it. But people who have looked at it seriously realise that the evidence is not there.”

Donnelly’s public skirmishes on the wild side of science seem to have done no harm to his real job – he gained a university chair last year – and by day he continues his research on ion beams and thin films, including the study of 10nm craters left by single ion impacts. His latest project is a virtual reality interface for a scanning probe microscope which will let the user fly over the bumpy surface of a specimen and, some day, pick up and stack atoms like grapefruit on a market stall.

After a quarter century of observing the paranormal scene, Donnelly shows no signs of flagging. He even toys with the idea of a new undergraduate course – Physics with Paranormal Studies, perhaps. So is he still receptive to the possibility of something startling? “Inevitably if you look at something for 25 years and everything points in a particular direction, you are not as open-minded as you were, ” he concedes. “But I like to think that the day the evidence is put before me I would treat it as respectfully as I would have done 25 years ago.”

Copyright © 2026 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors